With the advent of large-scale network connectivity, e.g., interconnection between intranets, the Internet, WANs, LANs, etc. (the term “network” will be used herein to generally reference all network types or combinations thereof), it has become increasingly difficult to locate and track networked devices, and to identify services or capabilities that may be offered by the networked devices. To facilitate dynamic discovery and platform neutral invocation of services, various “web service” related technologies have been implemented.
The phrase “web service” describes a standardized way of describing, discovering, and integrating network applications, services and resources from different businesses using open standards, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), including XML (Extensible Markup Language), SOAP, WSDL (Web Services Description Language), UPnP (Universal Plug and Play), UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration), etc., over a network, such as the Internet or other networks.
UDDI operates similarly to telephone book yellow and white pages, and is therefore commonly used to implement the service discovery aspect of “web services.” UDDI provides a network-based distributed directory enabling entities to list offered services, and conversely UDDI provides a mechanism for clients to dynamically find services being offered by other entities. To do so, UDDI uses a global set of registries (also referred to as directories or databases) to allow businesses to register their services, share information about how the business interacts with other businesses or entities, and to permit searching for other businesses, web services, or services or resources presently available on a network. For more information, see the UDDI Technical Specification located at URL (Internet Uniform Resource Locator) http://uddi#org/pubs/uddi-v3.00-published-20020719#htm (to prevent inadvertent hyperlinks, periods in URLs herein have been replaced with hash marks). As of this writing, the current UDDI specification is Version 3.0, published 19 Jul. 2002.
UDDI communicates using open standards, including XML, SOAP, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), etc. And, while UDDI's global nature provides a centralized source for locating offered services, the client is required to be in network communication with the UDDI registry in order for it to discover services. That is, a client is expected to be on a network over which a UDDI response may be received. This arrangement is impractical for mobile clients, such as a mobile computer, which may be temporarily unable to communicate with the UDDI registry (or registries) for lack a communication link over a viable network.